Before I do my due diligence as a judgmental little narc, I thoroughly enjoyed Nope in the classical, ‘let’s all go the movies’ sense, a genuine, you know, ‘go to the theater’ film movie. And paramount to any criticism, it seems Jordan Peele is enjoying doing what he loves and doing it pretty well. 

I saw Nope on $3 movie Saturday, bought a ticket with loose, pocket-wet ones like a little tramp in some NYU freshman’s beatnik dreamscape, also a cherry coke and a bag of popcorn, an appropriate size for a couple, if one of the pair has social anxiety and a sensitive stomach, or general well-bred table manners and if the other has shit manners and grabs a fat fingerful at a time. I intuit, sitting behind the two, this is their second date. The first went well enough to crack the door on the potential of a second engagement. So it’s $3 movie day! The weather is pleasant, and like most casualties of personality, as her id and its impulse take the reins, she asks first… “I’d love to see you again?”. But now she’s shoveling popcorn into her open mouth and her date can feel my judgment radiating outwards from the row behind. They will not see each other again after tonight. 

Not even half a page in, and I’ve lost the review. I am, like you, Jordan, one of the country’s casualties of the ADHD epidemic. Ok, look, let’s get organized, let’s first start in the muck.

I am seeing Nope because my boyfriend told me to, and by that standard, this is already a movie for optimistic and beautiful people. Going to see this movie alone is an act of devotion (or obedience, depending on your perversions), but equally so because it is dog hot in Philadelphia today, and fifty or so police officers are barricading the mall. I was going to wander around Ulta, but PPD said no. I love seeing movies alone, almost as much as I love wandering around the Ulta, which is to say, in cases like these, I’m going to see the movie most convenient — it’s 6:30? The 7:15, Nope? Sure enough. Could’ve just as easily been Bodies 3x or the Aranoa movie for middle-aged Madrileño ex-pats. I’ll have a lazy walk to the theater, pass the milling cops, and I’ll sit still and be wherever the movie tells me I am.

Here is a list of things I did not like about Nope:

• I could just have easily been at another movie. What? You mean the marketing team didn’t take my specific persuasions into account? Well, you’re in my review, my proverbial sandbox.
• I hated the cinematographer character, what was the point? That white guys get weird after 55? That Jordan Peele is so different from the Hollywood erudite? If Hollywood were guided by BressonBergmanRohmerTarr types, I would not be so disappointed in American cinema. (This is my obligatory “I spent time abroad” dog whistle). 
• Yes, a character was bound to parrot the title. But twice? Cheap.
• I loved the soundtrack and hated the score. If I wanted to hear music for cool people, I would’ve just turned on my discover weekly or gone to the vinyl-deck cocktail bar for ceramicists and marketing copywriters in my neighborhood. I don’t understand the point, Jordan, but I believe you when you insist that you know what the kids are into.
• Something I thought would be explored, but I was not shocked when I was wrong: the chimp! What about the chimp, the gold cord on the curtains, the opening of the movie? He must be a thematic crux, for he holds no specific bearing on the central plot, aside from being an unexplored traumatic background for Steven Yeun’s rhinestone cowboy. No trauma comes through in Steven’s performance. In fact, nothing complex or human comes through in his character. He’s a chummy childstar turned rodeo ringman slash businessman who witnessed his co-stars ripped apart and consumed by a hominid? Paper doll and a chance for the costume department to break out the bedazzler. I am both disappointed and bored.
• Angel haphazardly mentioned the potential identity of aliens as an evolutionary “next step”? Is that it? The alien v. human battleground? Is the heart of Nope the horror of being a dancing monkey for your evolutionary successor? (forgive the pun) Is humanity’s attack on alien life really a spear thrown through the fabric of time? Is Gordy’s massacre a mimeograph or premonition of OJ and Emerald’s offensive? Are we to be mortally wounded by our progeny? It seems I am misunderstanding the movie. The monkey plot is ornamentation, thinly linked through the mysterious balanced (levitating????) slipper in the opening sequence. We need an Ending Explained YouTube that’ll make this alien/monkey collusion make sense, and then I will get in the bathtub and drop the toaster in. Even in the face of cosmic horror, Gordy’s massacre is string lights on the borderlands of the movie, which makes the movie thinner and cheaper. If, in this metaphor, Gordy’s plot is string lights (maybe these), that makes it so that Nope becomes disorienting and somewhat Boschian in its excesses, like a frat house living room and our allegorical frat brother (me) is in the basement choking on Ciroc. Gordy doesn’t offer much existential suggestion (despite the begging, gaping door that pleads, walk through me, just try). Sci-fi has historically been a vehicle to exorcize our collective existential and societal anxieties, and given Jordan’s penchant for making ‘Pinterest board’ movies, I had my breath bated waiting for the inevitable Planet of the Apes nod, the coronary evolutionary anguish. Almost, but not quite, a tease here and there, but I’m drowned in quotables, relatable moments, and tchotchke details you could use to sell merch. Jordan Peele erases another prescription pickup text. 

Jordan, stay focused, or you’ll behave like the director I would’ve been when I was 19, manic, without conviction, making a menagerie of my current obsessions but nothing that indicates curiosity or observation.

Here is a list of things I liked about Nope… I will get distracted, so navigate with your own wolf and value compass:

• The opening is horrifying, deeply and perversely horrifying. As a child raised by CSI Las Vegas, Miniclip, and ISIS beheadings, my stomach is usually strong. But Gordy is feral, pensive, breathless, and so painfully quiet. American has an infatuation with humans killed by their animal companions, Kelly Ann Walls, Seigfried and Roys, the Jane Goodall of the Connecticut suburbs, Charla Nash. Like babies dying forgotten in parked cars, a pet turning on its owner has the mythological inevitability, a ‘canon of the tabloids’ if that makes sense. Its tragedy, delicious in its frank symbolism. But a chimp attack, in particular, has a certain flavor of evolutionary subversion – and on a sitcom! to a child star! And her cardboard family, the levels of power and exploitation are complicated. Our stunning Maddie Ziegler-esque little sister comes on screen for the first time like she just got her period for the first time or her proverbial childstar-mother/pimp just subjected her to talent trailer abuse. She’s on stage smile-grimacing, the way a show pony gets the whip and yet glimmers in the ring. Whatever the core discomfort is, I’m engaged. It’s like a premonition, the way virginal girls have, for millennia, been burdened with clairvoyance.
• A rare and gorgeous thing to see the SFX team get to open up the proverbial pit. Earlier in the movie, I anticipated some sedition from Steven Yun, treason of his kind, since, for the first three-quarters of the movie, the UFO was cowboy hat shaped. Yawn! Bawk! Ok, Cowboys versus Aliens never got its due? (let Jon know, laud the DP, scalp the editor, that’s my prognosis) According to popular opinion, it was either groundbreaking or forgettable. This is a genre: groundbreakingly forgettable. So, Steven sells alien sightings to an audience, but for how long has he had his little show, and have the Haywoods kept their eyes down while Steven built his empire? Is he a wealthy man by murder? How often does he have to feed the hungry thing? Is he the Vince McMahon of extraterrestrial showmanship? But he gets ate. Am I disoriented? Sure. Mad? Never cared about him much anyways. But alas, hat no more, the spacecraft blooms! It opens up at its most fox-in-the-beartrap state, feral and seething. It becomes coleoid, a massive ivory violaceae predator. Lovely (save that it at times looks like a light fixture at the Waldorf Astoria), it’s excellent, it moves well, and I am relieved that we dodge some tedious treason subplot. Let the SFX dorks work! Adobe After Effects is a stone wall to me (since I was born beautiful).
• Blood coming down over the window with the rain, just a second delayed, what a beautiful canonical image. Like the sheet of milk-colored hair in aglow against the TV static, like the summit of concrete stairs to Satan’s DC den, this is why I watch horror, to collect new loteria cards that haunt me while I twitch alone in my bed.
• The lonely cry of a horse’s winnie over the shallow hills of Los Angeles. I will watch westerns for the noise alone, awakening the little Calamity Jane that lives in the brain. The hills of Los Angeles are saturated with moans and cries, what a remote place populated by people so desperate to be seen. The sound design, while it was hard at moments to separate diegetic from non-diegetic (Aw, it was deliberate? Skewer me.), I think, byinlarge, did a fine job capturing the excess of flat land, the loneliness and the anxiety, the prolongation of time and space which occurs when you have seen the blood-soaked teeth of death and know that it waits to gnash you in its eager jaws.
• Jaws, Jaws, let’s talk about Jaws! If exploding a predatory beast in the blue, blue abyss (sky or sea) means another generation will see Jaws and, given natural curiosity, will stroll about in the milieu of cinematic inspiration, then god willing, let all our inspirations, from here on out, be as gauche as the second most gauche rip from Nope! More egregious but less towering in the mausoleum of American cinema, the disfigured child star with her veil, teeth pulled back, no liberties, no adaptations, scraped from They Live. I beg of you, Jordan (and you too, Guillermo), some nuisance. 
• I save my most earnest credit for the end. Amid a cast I found appropriate but cliched, Daniel Kaluuya was my redemption, an unwilling and painfully human character trapped in a pit with an ensemble of characters polluted by dull satire and Twitter affect. Am I to expect everyone in this movie is a month away from their GQ profile? Is that what you think we want? Forgive me for adding Keke Palmer’s costume department to my shopping cart, but, in earnest, I don’t want to be sold to at the movies. Daniel though, maybe a little too ‘everyman’ at times, is an unwilling hero, with a skillset built serendipitous to fight aliens. And I believe him! I believe that he could live down the street from me and dam his obstinance and protector-urge to self-sacrifice and return for the final frame, the plywood borders, the smoke, the stakes) as a messiah figure, the unkillable, the Black Cowboy.
• The Black Cowboy, what a figure, black, silhouetted against the purple hills and sunset inflamed. Naturally, we’ve seen in recent years, the dredges of America’s racial atrocities exhumed, Tusla, Medgar Evers, things that if you’re, like me, a casualty of the Mason-Dixon embargo on fair and candid historical recountance or a sweetgreen blonde from suburban, liberal California (it’s never made much of a difference, has it). The Black Cowboy, unearthed from the mausoleum of white negligence, has become a recent addition to American mythology, neither good nor evil, not spiteful, not vengeful, moving across the mesa like a shadow. I never saw Concrete Cowboy, but I was early repelled by the production spearhead (my apologies to the one industrious white man, kickstarter jockey, who shares too close a resemblance with the Mud Hawker), but I heard it was kind of shit… The Cowboy, the apex of American solitude, individualism, and resolve, embodied by the disparaged American man. What a figure, and what a vision, the Black Cowboy moved by duty not just by blunt heroism but by truth, mesa stewardship, and vital righteousness. And even more culturally recent, the Black Cowboy, the Hood Cowboy, the boys on horses outside the Burger King. I had a classmate that had an appaloosa in the hood under The 10. Did he take care of the horse, feed it well, brush it, give it space? No. Animal protective services came and took that horse away. I do not consider this a great tragedy, everyone knew that horse was starving, but can a poor black boy not be awestruck by equine divinity? Outside experience, the films in which I have seen American human-horse companionship have been Northeastern horse-rich Betty Draper polish, angsty midwestern white girls that get the ol’ squarestate prozac prescription (earning the trust of a wild horse) (careful or the Sacklers will make extinct this species of caucasian queen) or Matt Damon, the voice of a Lakota Stallion… look, we take what we get. But a black boy galloping manic through American valleys has occurred before on American land. The white townsfolk are coming to level his farm, he’s on the back of a trackhorse for a white academic’s Stanford thesis project or in the line at the Burger King. All of humankind becomes awestruck in the presence of the equine, and in Nope, the hood cowboy is liberated, he rides with the noon air in his face, with a soulless and hungry evil, drifting with idiot omnipotence in the clouds above. 

I am leaving the theater, the summer is balmy like bathwater, I could walk straight home, but instead, I meander down Market, past the cops, doing their best, “I’m on government payroll” face, get a cherry chip cone and walk home. The summer is still warm, my hands are sticky with milk, what a canonical Saturday night, I bathe in its leisure and whimsy.